


032 "young"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [32]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, My Pepper is different, Post-Iron Man, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 05:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While discussing Pepper’s sci-fi origins, Tony learns some disturbing things: that she was relatively quite young when she was bound to her synthetic body, that she didn’t really have a choice in the matter, and that she can never go home. “But sometimes I just got a little tired of hearing that I wouldn’t understand something because I had always been a corporeal being. I mean, wouldn’t you?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	032 "young"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. At some point I'll post a timeline.
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.

            “Can I ask you a personal question?” Given what we had been doing twelve hours earlier this opener might have been a bit on the conservative side. But with Pepper you could never tell. Besides, I was in a somewhat vulnerable position at the moment.

            “You can’t have any of my cheeseburger,” she answered peremptorily.

            I rolled my eyes at Pepper’s definition of a personal question, but the effect was lost since I wasn’t really facing her. “No, it’s about the project that created you.” Just for your personal orientation, this was all occurring _after_ Pepper and I were A Couple, which was _after_ I knew she was a trans-dimensional being, which was _after_ After.

            “You may ask,” Pepper allowed. She was sitting on the bed holding a half-eaten cheeseburger in one hand with the other hand resting on my shoulder. I was lying facedown on the bed, trying not to squirm as Pepper applied her healing touch to the massive bruise darkening my back. I got run over by a tank, you see. Normally this would have resulted in three milliseconds of bone-crushing agony followed by death, but thanks to the Iron Man suit, it merely resulted in hours of muscle-straining agony. So, an improvement, really.

            I had been doing a lot of thinking about this Pepper-making project. Brilliant scientists and engineers had constructed a nearly invulnerable synthetic shell to allow a sentient being to live in our world and protect me. _I_ was a brilliant engineer who had constructed a hopefully invulnerable synthetic shell to allow my considerable sentience to protect and defend in a hostile world. I felt there was a certain kinship between me and these other-dimensional beings, even though they were just colorful collections of light energy (according to Pepper) and I was, well, awesome _me_. Guess their dimension just wasn’t big enough for both brilliance _and_ good looks.

            “Well, I’m curious about the timeline of development,” I admitted to her. Pepper didn’t really seem uncomfortable discussing the subject, but I felt I ought to bring it up delicately anyway. I thought it might be vaguely akin to quizzing someone about what kind of fertility treatments their parents had used to conceive them. “How long did it take to, er, build the, um, body?” Which, I might add, was as much a work of art as of pure functional engineering. But then again, all great designs are.

            “Well, we measure time differently than you do,” Pepper cautioned.

            “Granted.”

            She gave it some thought. “I would say six or seven Earth years.”

            I counted back. Something didn’t seem quite right with that number. “That would mean you started building it nine or ten years before we met.”

            “I believe so,” she agreed.

            “I thought you had started building it after I became CEO,” I pointed out. “But that’s not enough time.” Don’t know where I got that idea, really; it seemed like a logical assumption, I suppose. “You must have started before that.”

            “It was widely speculated you would become CEO after your graduation from college,” Pepper reminded me. She shifted her cool hand to a different spot on my shoulder. “It was felt a safe bet.”

            I nodded into the pillow and was chided for moving. “At what point did you join up?” I asked her.

            “Around the same time, when construction was begun on the body.” She finished off her cheeseburger and moved to unwrap a second one. I made an easily-interpreted whine, reminiscent of Buster begging at the table. Which was essentially what I was doing. “I need to consume large quantities of calories in order to fuel the electro-stimulant portion of my metabolism,” Pepper reminded me. Translated, this meant she needed to eat a lot so she could heal me. “Since you are not currently able to provide me with a more efficient source of energy,” she added, which I thought was a bit mean.

            “I’m _injured_ ,” I pointed out to her. “We can’t have sex until I’m _not_ injured.” Proving yet again that Pepper was in every way perfect for me and that I was the most fortunate man alive (despite the occasional tank-related mishap), it turned out that having sex was actually like food for Pepper. Really, really good food, like a Big Mac covered in trail mix and smothered in guacamole. Lots of fuel all in one shot. Or, you know, multiple shots per day. It was something about pheromones and kinetic versus potential energy and neurotransmitters but frankly I always got rather distracted whenever she tried to explain it. I was content to operate on faith in this matter, though I felt repeated trials of the procedure were prudent, to make sure the process was still working, you know.

            “Well, if we can’t have sex until you’re not injured,” Pepper began, in far too obnoxious a tone, “and I’m supposed to un-injure you, I require an alternative fuel source.” Hence the bag of greasy, golden cheeseburgers tormenting me with their salty, fried scent. “Any reduction in the calories I obtain from them will lengthen the time required to heal you. Which would lengthen the time until we could have sex.”

            “True,” I agreed, “a prospect I’m fundamentally against. However, you _do_ have to feed me at some point, Pepper, before you parasitically suck the energy from my body for your own purposes.” And I was a perfectly willing victim in this scheme.

            She frowned at me. “I am not parasitic,” she countered primly. “The relationship is mutually beneficial.” Was it ever. “But you have a point,” she conceded. “I wouldn’t want you… falling down on the job.”

            I made a noise of protest. “Pepper, innuendos are only funny when _I_ make them,” I told her. “Or when _you_ don’t _realize_ you’re making them. Now gimme some food already.” Sometimes you just had to be direct, you know.

            “Fine. Here is a French fry.” She poked the golden salty stick of grease into my mouth.

            “It’s _cold_ ,” I protested, chewing. “You can expect only a substandard product with _that_ kind of input.”

            “Fine. Here is a small piece of cheeseburger.”

            “That’s what I’m talking about !” I mumbled around the massive chunk she had stuffed into my mouth. I would hate to see Pepper try to feed a small child.

            Several moments passed with only chewing noises heard. I had to admit that my back was beginning to feel better, in that sort of agonizing pins-and-needles way you get when the feeling returns to a limb that fell asleep.

            “So, were you a scientist?” I finally asked. “A physicist or anthropologist or something? An astronaut?”

            “No.”

            I sensed some withholding here. Of course, Pepper was never really very forthcoming with personal details. “Well, what was your profession, then?” I persisted. “Some kind of expert on culture in this dimension? If so, I’d think about suing whatever institution granted you that degree, no offense.”

            She pushed another piece of cheeseburger at me. I wondered if she was going to trot out that old, ‘we didn’t have bodies back in my dimension’ chestnut to answer my question—don’t get me wrong, I’m sure being composed entirely of energy _does_ alter certain fundamental things about your society. But sometimes I just got a little tired of hearing that I wouldn’t understand something because I had always been a corporeal being. I mean, wouldn’t you? Like Pepper had a perfect understanding of life in _this_ dimension (not). Plus, that line of hers always reminded me of my grandpa, whom I vaguely remembered as a skinny old guy telling me delightfully frightening stories about how he worked at Los Alamos during World War II until my parents laughed nervously and pulled me away. Come to think of it, he liked whiskey a lot, too, just like Pepper.

            “I didn’t really have a profession,” Pepper said.

            I dragged my mind back to the question I had asked her—I could get far afield pretty quickly. “Why not?” I prodded. “What, were you some kind of unemployed blob of light living in your parents’ basement?”

            “We don’t have _basements_ ,” she informed me with some disgust.

            “I meant ‘basement’ metaphorically,” I assured her. “Please, explain further.”

            “Well, I was… hmm…” She paused thoughtfully. I paused, intrigued. Well, I didn’t really _pause_ as I was only lying on the bed—but I waited attentively. “I didn’t have a profession _yet_ because I was too young.”

            “Um… _young_?” I repeated nervously. “How young are we talking about here?”

            “Well, we measure time differently than you do.”

            “You said that already.”

            “And we live a lot longer, so we develop more slowly.”

            “Pepper, just give me a number,” I insisted.

            “I was… less than two hundred Earth years old,” she finally decided.

            “Oh, well, not even two hundred!” I cracked, feeling relieved again. “You were practically an infant!” For a second there I was worried I had met her when she was still a—

            “That’s before our species reaches reproductive maturity,” she pointed out.

            I started to choke on the last bit of cheeseburger and Pepper had to whack my back a couple times, which was really painful. “I knew feeding you while you were lying down was a bad idea,” she commented.

            “Well, good G-d, Pepper, you just told me you were a little _kid_ when we met!” I sputtered, trying to sit up. “I mean, I was ogling you from behind my desk and patting your a-s as we got into the car! And you were, like, five! That’s just icky, Pepper. You just told me I’m a trans-dimensional child molester. That’s definitely worth choking on!”

            “Would you please lie still,” she commanded, pushing me back down onto the bed. “I’m almost done. Then you’re going to soak in the hot tub and we can have sex.”

            I buried my face in my arms with a groan. “Pepper! You’re not listening to me here! Have you even reached sexual maturity _yet_?! Oh my G-d…”

            She gave me an unimpressed look. “Are you finished being overdramatic?” she asked coolly.

            “Overdramatic?” I repeated with indignation. “Pepper, we’ve been having sex, but you just told me you only had the brains of a ten-year-old! I’m not sure one _could_ be ‘over’ in response to that! Now I feel like I’m some kind of dirty old man!”

            “Normally you’re very clean for a human,” she told me soothingly, “although at the moment you _could_ use a shower.” Clearly she was not getting it. “And relative to the average age of humans in this country, you’re not old. Anyway,” she went on, without concern, “you’re making assumptions again. We don’t have _bodies_ , you know, so our sexual development takes a different path than yours.” See what I mean? It’s so annoying. “My parents were married for quite some time before they had developed reproductive capabilities,” she added, “so it’s certainly not analogous to being a human child.”

            I suppose this made me feel better, although also kind of confused. “Oh. So it wasn’t like I was making a pass at you and you were thinking, ‘Mommy, the scary man is giving me bad touches’?”

            “No,” she replied, although not with the level of certainty I’d been hoping for.

            “Pepper, I really need to be clear on this,” I told her. “Seriously.”

            She thought over how best to explain it while I waited keenly, no longer letting my thoughts drift to her lovely construct. Just to be on the safe side. “Well, human sexual activity is really quite simplistic compared with my species’ version,” she finally came up with.

            I stared at her. “Pepper, you’re not really helping here,” I insisted. “Are you saying that in _this_ dimension I might be a child molester, but in yours I’m just a guy who likes to shake hands a lot?”

            She rolled her eyes. “It’s _rather_ difficult to understand if you’ve never been non-corporeal. Jarvis, please turn on the hot tub in Tony’s bathroom.”

            Pepper started to slide off the bed but I grabbed her arm and pulled her back. I was serious here. Complicated or not, this was something I wanted to have no doubts about. I didn’t want to be the guy who was always hitting on a girl without realizing it was actually freaking her out because she didn’t understand what I wanted. And if I _had_ been that guy, I wanted to know I wasn’t anymore. And if I was _still_ that guy—

            “You aren’t,” Pepper assured me, putting her hand on my cheek. “And while it’s true that at first I didn’t really understand what you wanted, I wasn’t ‘freaked out’ by it. I also didn’t understand how humans could survive on so little food, after all.”

            “Or what a surprise birthday party was,” I reminded her. “Or the purpose of casual clothing. Or how jigsaw puzzles worked. Or why people had pets. Or potato salad. Or—“

            “Obviously there were many things I didn’t understand about humans, even after I had been through college,” she conceded, adding quickly, “Or, indeed, _still_ don’t understand.”

            I patted her knee. “Don’t worry, I don’t really understand mimes, either,” I assured her, thinking of a recent unsettling incident with a street performer.

            “Understanding the human desire for physical contact was somewhat of an obstacle,” she continued, “but that really had nothing to do with my non-corporeal developmental stage. I just appreciated your attention, since it seemed to indicate I had successfully integrated myself into your life.”

            “Oh, you had,” I agreed, sliding my arms around her. I felt confident now that I had not, in fact, been acting inappropriately—er, _more_ inappropriately than I had thought at the time, that is. Another thought occurred to me, now that I could think about something besides myself. “Weren’t you kind of young, for them, to stick in a synthetic construct and shoot off to Earth? I mean, if you didn’t even have a profession yet…” I surmised that in Pepper’s native dimension one chose a career, then _later_ was able to have sex, which just showed how messed up those little blobs of light were.

            “It was thought that my youth would allow me to be more adaptable to life among humans,” she replied, but there was a sort of hesitancy behind the explanation—like it was something she had been told over and over until she believed it, but was now beginning to doubt. “And my personality was deemed compatible with a pleasing female human.”

            Normally at a line like this I might have grinned and expressed my total agreement. But instead I frowned. “Pepper, it’s starting to sound to me that you didn’t actually _choose_ to come to this dimension.”

            She shrugged, meeting my gaze. “It wasn’t presented to me as a choice, no,” she confirmed. “I was still under the guidance of my parents, one of whom was a scientist on the project, and it seemed I would be suitable to aid in achieving its goals.”

            I thought about her flat description for a moment. Pepper tended to leave a lot out when she tried to explain things. I had learned to read between the lines. It seemed to me like her parents had taken someone who was in many ways still a dependent child and forced her to leave home, to live in a world that operated by completely different rules and presented numerous unknown dangers, all to fulfill the goals of some science project. It wasn’t even something noble, like Superman’s parents sending him to Earth to save his life and to help humans. Well, Pepper’s job was to help, but only _one_ human, only _me_ , and for most of the time she was helping me figure out new ways to kill people, indirectly that is. So that wasn’t exactly what I would call a fantastic reason to toss a little kid into the wilderness.

            “It sounds like it was probably very scary for you,” I commented, trying not to sound too judgmental. My opinion of these scientists’ brilliance had just decreased, since I had recently begun factoring a certain amount of morality into my brilliance calculations. And anyone who put Pepper into scary situations was automatically a b-----d in _my_ book.

            Pepper smiled at me. It was a nice smile, reassuring and warm. “A little at first, maybe,” she finally admitted. “More confusing than anything else. Really.”

            “But you didn’t even get to decide—“

            She put her fingertips over my lips to shush me. “I’m not upset about it, I promise,” she told me. “And I don’t think you should be, either.”

            I smiled against her fingers. Sometimes the simplest gestures from Pepper could be very comforting. “I suppose, really, you’re better off here,” I suggested cheekily. “I mean, after all, as a blob of light you wouldn’t have gotten to meet _me_.”

            “That’s very true,” she agreed. “And, I think I was probably too young to really understand what I was missing by coming here. If I had been older it would have been a more difficult transition to make.”

            “So when do you report back?” I asked her, curious. “Do you go back on your vacations? Is that what you do?”

            “No, I _sleep_ on my vacations,” she corrected. Her gaze left mine. “I can’t go back.”

            “What?” I said after a moment.

            She looked me in the eye again. “The process of bonding my energy state to the synthetic construct is non-reversible,” she replied clearly. “I can’t go back to living in the other dimension in my native state.”

            “You mean you’re—stuck here _forever_?”

            She brushed my cheek with her cool hand, a gesture I usually found calming. “I _get_ to be here,” she countered with a smile. “I remember more from _this_ dimension than the one I was born in. Everything is faster here, more intense, more vibrant.” Her smile widened a bit. “I think you would find the other dimension extremely dull.”

            “But—Pepper—you can never see your parents again—“

            She curled up close against me. “Well, I have _you_ now, Tony.”

            I tightened my arms around her. Great, no pressure. Then again—I didn’t exactly have a lot of emotional supports besides Pepper, either. Which I realized was not exactly a healthy relationship, but when had our relationship _ever_ been healthy? “Well, I still don’t think they should have forced you to do it,” I grumbled against her hair.

            “You became CEO of your company when _you_ were very young,” Pepper remarked.

            I wasn’t sure where she was going with this. “Well, I _wanted_ to do that,” I pointed out. “Nobody _forced_ me. H—l, nobody even thought it was a good idea!” Even Obadiah had tried to talk me out of it, at least at first.

            “But you wouldn’t have had to if your parents hadn’t died,” she continued. “Circumstances forced you to do it.”

            “Well… I don’t know if it’s an exact parallel,” I hedged. I still felt as though I’d probably had more of a voice in the matter than Pepper had. “I mean, I was probably going to be CEO anyway one day, assuming I didn’t do anything so incredibly stupid that my dad cut me out before then.” If we looked at what I _had_ done with my life, it was likely he _would_ have booted me by now. On the other hand, I thought there was a decent chance many of the stupidest things wouldn’t have occurred if they hadn’t died then. Not that I’m trying to squirm out of accepting responsibility for my actions. But, let’s face it, if that 3AM phone call hadn’t started the story, all the other parts might have been very different.

            “What did you want to be when you grew up, Pepper?” I asked her with sudden curiosity. “When you were just a little blob of light daydreaming during school?”

            “We don’t have _days_ ,” she informed me.

            “Right, of course.”

            “But,” she revealed, “I wanted to be a ballerina.”

            I didn’t mean to snort derisively. It just kind of came out that way. Well, to be honest I just didn’t mean for it to come out, even though I was responding derisively inside. “I’m sorry,” I told her, even as I chuckled. “It’s very funny.”

            “I’m serious,” she insisted. And her expression said she was.

            “But Pepper,” I objected, “you guys don’t have _feet_! How could you be a ballerina?”

            “You’re being too literal,” she accused. I scoffed as she clearly didn’t recognize the incredible irony of her statement. “We have forms of movement which are based on rhythmic interpretations of sound waves.”

            “You guys dance.”

            “There are many different styles,” she confirmed, still sounding slightly indignant. “I was drawn to one of the more formal ones.”

            Unfortunately, picturing little blobs of light dancing around like fireflies on a summer night wasn’t any better for inspiring serious contemplation than picturing human-Pepper trying to stiffly twitch-dance on an ordinary dance floor. What can I say, it had been kind of a tense day (remember—run over by tank) and I needed the release.

            Pepper was now propped up on one elbow on the bed, looking down at me. Fortunately for me she was smiling. “We don’t laugh, either,” she said.

            “Another wonderful innovation brought to you by corporeal beings,” I giggled out. I reached for her. “In fact, I can think of _several_ corporeal innovations we could also explore—“

            She held me off. “Hot tub first,” Pepper ordered firmly. “You will be very glad in the morning, when you can move.”

            I sighed but realized she was correct. “Okay, Pep, whatever you say. I guess technically you _are_ old than me…”

* * *


End file.
